NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 23: Production manager Jimmy Valm adds hops to the boil in the brewhouse at Brooklyn Brewery on October 23, 2012 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. A total of eight fermenters are being installed this week which will allow the craft brewery to make 100,000 barrels of beer per year, 24 hours a day. A mid-year report by the Brewer's Association cited a 12 percent increase in craft beer sales to 6 million barrels this year. The number of American breweries have surged to a 125-year-high of 2,126 breweries last year, 97 percent of which are independent craft breweries. During the pre-Prohibition era Brooklyn had more than 45 breweries and was one of the largest brewing centers in the U.S., today Brooklyn Brewery is the only brewery in the borough. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The bigger news is the sale orchestrated by Brooklyn, which helped launch the gentrification of the borough when it opened in the late 1990s and whose master brewer, Garrett Oliver, is revered worldwide as an expert in food and beer pairings. On its website, the 11th largest craft brewery in the United States by sales volume described the partnership as “a new sales and distribution platform” and toward the end of the statement mentioned that it “has made minority investments in both 21st Amendment and Funkwerks in support of the partnership.”

But it didn’t directly address the question industry observers always ask first: what size share of the companies did the larger entity buy? A Brooklyn spokesperson emailed to say that while she couldn’t disclose the terms, both breweries would remain independent under the Brewers Association’s definition.

In truth, the percentage doesn’t matter so much in this case. Often, brewery fans want to know if a partial sale to a larger brewery exceeds the 24.9% ownership cap that determines whether a small, independent brewery can continue to identify itself as “craft” according to the BA. (There is no legal definition of “craft” so the BA tends to set the industry standard.) But because Brooklyn itself remains a craft brewery despite a minority share held by Japanese brewery Kirin and an international investment and distribution partnership with Copenhagen’s foundation-held Carlsberg Group, it could have purchased both breweries outright without changing their status.